Native American Indians

As a child I spent numerous hours hiking with my family in the mountains of
Southern Utah looking for Indian Petroglyphs, arrow heads and pottery.
My Father had a deep love for the Indian culture which was manafested
in his art. In the process of finding
ideas to use in his art, he took numerous pictures
of petroglyphs in southern Utah. A number of these rock drawings
have since been destroyed due to new housing developments, vandelism,
and weather erosion.
This section of ScienceViews is dedicated to my father Max Hamilton.

The First Americans

The Mound Builders

The Lost Civilizations of North America
This section is dedicated to one of the greatest tragedies in American archeology — the wanton destruction and neglect of some of the most important Native American archeological treasures.

Cahokia Mounds, Illinois
Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, in Collinsville, Illinois, is located on the Mississippi River floodplain,
across from St. Louis, Missouri. This site was first inhabited by Indians of the Late
Woodland culture about AD 700.

Fort Hill, Ohio
Fort Hill is a Native American fortification built by the Hopewell Indians
nearly 2,000 years ago, and is one of the best preserved Indian structures
in North America.

Hopewell Culture Center, Ohio
Mounds and earthworks along the Scioto River, doubtless the work of many human hands,
make us wonder. Who made them? How long have they stood? What role did they play
in the lives of their builders?

Newark Earthworks, Ohio
The Newark Earthworks were built by the Hopewell culture between 100 BC and
500 AD and was one of the architectural wonders of ancient America with the
largest set of geometric earthen enclosures in the world.

Seip Mound, Ohio
Seip Mound is the second largest earthen mound built by the Native American Hopewell people.
The mound is 240 feet long, 130 feet wide, and 30 feet high.

Serpent Mound, Ohio
This quarter mile long earthworks looks like a gigantic serpent in the act
of uncoiling.

Story Mound, Ohio
Story Mound is a large, round earthen Adena mound located in Chillicothe, Ohio.

Calf Creek Indians, Utah
The beautiful Calf Creek
canyons were once inhabited by ancient American Indians.
Today their presence and influence still remain in the form of ancient
dwellings, storage structures (graineries), and hugh life size pictographs.

Chaco Culture National Historical Park, New Mexico
For all the wild beauty of Chaco Canyon's high desert landscape, its long
winters, short growing seasons, and marginal rainfall create an unlikely
place for a major center of ancestral Puebloan culture to take root and
flourish. Yet this valley was the center of a thriving culture a thousand
years ago.

Hovenweep National Monument, Utah-Colorado
The towers of Hovenweep were built by ancestral Puebloans, a sedentary farming culture
that occupied the Four Corners area from about A.D. 500 to A.D. 1300. Similarities in
architecture, masonry and pottery styles indicate that the inhabitants of Hovenweep
were closely associated with groups living at Mesa Verde and other nearby sites.

Mesa Verde, Colorado
About 1,400 years ago, long before Europeans explored North America, a group of people living in the Four
Corners region chose Mesa Verde for their home. For more than 700 years they and their descendants lived
and flourished here, eventually building elaborate stone communities in the sheltered alcoves of the canyon
walls.

Petroglyph National Monument, Arizona
As you walk the trails of Petroglyph National Monument, it seems as if voices, from the rocks, speak to tell the story of people who lived long ago, who walked the same ground, and left their legacy in images carved upon the black basaltic rocks.

George Catlin
George Catlin was a painter and writer specializing in the artistic preservation of the natives of North America.
He worked under the premonition that the North American Indians were a "dying race." As such, he took special care to document the Indians in their natural element.